Did you know you can send personalized mass emails in Gmail?
Well, you can, and there are actually a couple of ways to do it.
So this is your Gmail mail merge tutorial.
Hey friends!
I’m Tasia Custode and welcome back to my YouTube Channel where I share tech tips, app
reviews, and enough Gmail content to make you wonder why other email providers even
exist.
Today, I’m showing you how to send personalized bulk emails in Gmail.
So, let’s go.
So as I mentioned at the top, there are a couple of ways to send bulk emails in Gmail.
So first, let’s start with the quickest and easiest way to do so, and that’s by
utilizing a feature from the sponsor of today’s video, Right Inbox.
Right Inbox actually has twelve features, nine of which are available for free.
All of which supercharge your Gmail account.
So, first, you’ll want to head to right inbox dot come and click ‘install for free’
in order to add Right Inbox to Gmail.
Now, you’re going to want to upgrade your plan in order to access Right Inbox’s Mail
merge feature - but at about $6.00 per month, the upgrade is well worth it if you send a
lot of recurring or bulk emails.
Trust me.
Once Right Inbox is installed, you will now have a mail merge option near the top left
of your Gmail account.
Simply click on the mail merge option and here you can click on create a campaign.
First, I recommend titling your campaign.
This can be whatever makes sense to you.
There are really only four simple steps here.
First, we’ll add recipients.
You can either upload a csv file or add recipients manually.
If you want to upload a csv file, I’d recommend downloading the sample csv so that you follow
the proper formatting.
But we’ll talk a little bit more about csv files later.
I think the easiest way to create a mail merge in gmail is to add your recipients manually.
This way, there’s no coding or proper formatting required.
So we’ll select ‘add manually’.
Here, all we have to do is add the email addresses and names to the table.
You can even add column names for additional information if you want.
So if you had a specific vertical within this campaign, you could add that here.
Once your table is filled out, we’ll click on ‘create sequence’ to move on to step
two.
Here, we’ll simply compose our message.
So, we’ll add a subject line.
And now we’ll add the body of the message.
If you used the Mail Merge feature with Right Inbox before, you could also use the dropdown
menu to the right of the load sequence option to select a sequence you’ve used in the
past.
You can also save and exit at anytime.
So now let’s insert the mail merge field.
We’ll place our cursor where we want the recipient’s name, and we’ll click on the
‘insert merge field’ option to the right, and select name.
Now this is where you’d have the other options if you added say a vertical or date or whatever
other column you added in step one.
But you can see that name has been added between two curly brackets right where I wanted it.
So, anywhere you want a specific mail merge field to go, you’ll just click there in
the body of the email, and then select that mail merge field.
You can also add a follow-up message, and choose when the follow-up message will be
sent.
I just love this feature too.
You can set it and forget it and let Right Inbox do the work for you.
Once you’re ready to move on, click on preview.
In this step, we can preview each and every email to make sure it is personalized just
the way we want.
To do so, just toggle through the arrows on either side of the email address bar.
Now all that’s left to do is send off the personalized bulk emails.
Click on confirm and launch, and from here let’s select the date and time we’d like
the first email to be sent at.
We can even toggle on link and open tracking - which are other great Right Inbox features
- and then you can set your send rate here too.
So if you’re mass emailing to hundreds of people, you can send to 250 per day.
Toggle on where you understand Gmail has a daily message limit, then simply click on
‘start mail merge’ near the top right.
And Voila!
That’s how to send personalized bulk emails in gmail.
It’s really so easy.
Trust me, I am a cheap person and normally would not pay for add-ons.
But I’m telling you, if you send a lot of bulk emails out, just pay the 6 bucks a month
for Right Inbox and let them take care of all the formatting for you.
And if you want more information on right inbox and all their features, head to rightinbox.com.
So now let’s learn how to send personalized bulk emails in Gmail for free.
For this, we’re going to use a little developer trick and a little help from Google Sheets.
Warning: this takes a little bit longer and there are quite a few more steps, but, like
I said, it’s free.
The first thing we need to do is head to this Google Workspace for developers page, which
I’ve linked down below.
We’re going to scroll down to the try it section and and click on ‘make a copy’.
This new google sheets page will come up asking you if you’d like to make a copy of this
document, which we do.
So click on make a copy again.
Now, here we are in our Mail merge spreadsheet.
So this is your own sheet now since you made a copy so you can title it whatever you want,
like maybe you want to do this based on campaign, you could change that.
And you can customize any of these headers and columns except for the recipient and email
sent columns.
So the recipient is where we’re going to put in the email addresses of the recipients
we are going to send to and the email sent column is going to give us a sent confirmation
once the email is actually sent.
So let’s use the magic of editing to fill out this spreadsheet according to our needs.
So now we have the spreadsheet filled out with first and last names, emails, the verticals
the recipients fall under and remember, we can change or remove any of these except for
the recipient and email sent.
So, maybe you want to change the vertical to a date field because maybe this is for
an upcoming event, you could simply change this entire column to reflect that.
So, once you’re all set in your Google Sheet, let’s head over to our Gmail.
You’re going to proceed as usual in Gmail by composing the email you want to send in
bulk.
Once you have that all done, in the to field we’re going to put in two left curly brackets.
Then we are going to head back to our Mail Merge sheet and copy the recipient header
cell.
So Select the header cell and hit command c or control c.
Then, let’s head back to our Gmail and paste that in the To field right after our left
curly brackets.
Then let’s close this with two right curly brackets.
Notice there are no spaces anywhere here in the To field.
So what these curly brackets do is personalize the bulk email for you.
So anything within curly brackets will be specified, or unique if you will.
So, we used the curly brackets for our To field because over here on the mail merge
sheet we want to send to these specific email addresses, so each one individually.
So the curly brackets indicate we want to send out each individually.
Am I making sense?
Are you following?
Because…
we can apply this same theory for other uses in our bulk email.
As an example in the subject field, we can add them to our subject.
So, remember how we’ve got a vertical listed in the Sheet?
Well, maybe we want to specify that vertical in the subject.
So, instead of What You Must Know Now in Order to Grow, we could say What you must know now
in order to grow your then add our two left curly brackets add vertical then close that
with our right curly brackets Business.
So this will be replaced with their individual assigned vertical.
Then we will do the same for their names in the body of the email.
So Hey curly bracket curly bracket first name then two more brackets.
And remember, this is an exact copy of the header in the Google Sheet, with caps and
space and all.
So, if you changed your header, copy over that exact header and paste it between your
curly brackets.
So like I said, you can apply this method to anywhere in the body of this email.
So if you wanted to mention the vertical again or the CID number or whatever other header
you have, you could do that here.
So we’re just doing manually what right inbox did automatically for us.
So now we want to actually send the emails out.
So we’ll head back to our Sheet and click on Mail Merge at the top and then click on
Send Emails.
In this pop up you’ll have to authorize this action, so just press continue.
Choose your Google Account and then you might get this scary-looking pop up that the app
isn’t verified, but you can rest assured this is safe.
We got this from the Google Workspace for developers page.
So click on advanced then scroll down and select the ‘go to gmail/sheets mail merge’
option.
Then, just click allow.
Now before we actually send the bulk emails, I would encourage you to do these exact steps
but test it by sending it to yourself and a friend or another account you have.
Just so you can make sure everything is correct.
I’m going to assume you’ve done that and that you’re comfortable moving forward with
the bulk send.
So, now let’s head back to Gmail and copy the subject line using command or control
c.
Then back in our Sheet, let’s head back to mail merge and click on send emails.
And now, this time paste in the subject line of the Gmail draft, using command or control
v. Then hit OK.
And that’s all there is to it.
Before you know it the email sent column is going to populate with the date and time stamps
the email was sent at.
Now you can just duplicate this every time you need to send a personalized bulk email
for free.
But remember earlier, when we talked about uploading a csv file with Right Inbox?
Well, you could always create your table in Google Sheets then export that as a csv file
and upload it using the Right Inbox Mail Merge feature.
It’s still way simpler than copying and pasting all the curly brackets over to the
right fields.
Either way, now you have options when it comes to sending mass emails in Gmail.
So that’s your Gmail mail merge tutorial.
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See ya next time!